fathers, brothers and sisters, partners, etc), but this can also be
generally extended to any human relationship. This fear very frequently
stems from childhood, when the child has been subjected to physical
and/or psychological ill-treatment and/or abuse, within or outside the
family.
Other fears that do not come under the previous definition would be
fear of the unknown, fear of death, and the fear of suffering (physical
or psychic). Fear of the unknown generates insecurity because in the
unknown we always imagine great threats and danger. Fear of death
is in fact a fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing what can come
after death or that what comes after death is the worst scenario, the
void.
There is still one more fear, the great fear of human beings, which
deserves a special mention, and from which all other fears derive, and
that is the fear of knowing ourselves, the fear of discovering what we
really are, with our defects and our virtues.
We are scared of discovering our defects. We believe erroneously that
if we are conscious of our defects we will suffer more, because we
have great problems in admitting our own egoism, and that the
majority of our evils come from that egoism. Being conscious makes
our “self-respect” suffer, which is still a manifestation of egoism, but not
the spiritual “I”, which is wishing to detach itself from egoism to be
happy. And, in order to detach ourselves from egoism, we must first be
conscious of the fact that we have egoism, and secondly of how it is
manifested. We needn’t be scared to admit egoism, because we all
have it and we are all at one point or another along the path of being
detached from egoism. But if through fear of knowing ourselves we
camouflage our egoism for a long time, we will stagnate and suffer
much more.
We are also scared of discovering our virtues or manifestations of love,
such as feeling, sensitivity, humility, tenderness, compassion, altruism,
because we are scared that we might suffer, that others might hurt us,
or that others may take advantage of us, if we put them into practice.
From this stems the fear of a negative reaction of others towards us. But
if we overcome that fear, and in spite of everything we fight to be
ourselves, to awaken our loving “I”, the happiness of the inner self will
be so strong that it will be able to cope with all suffering, and all the
attacks that we may receive from outside. The fear of death also stems
from the fear of knowing ourselves. Fear of death arises through